Many marketing professionals use key performance indicators or email metrics to assess the campaign’s success. But are you looking for email engagement metrics that one should track? Here is the list of 5 email engagement metrics you should be tracking.
- The essential: Clickthrough Rate
When thinking about email newsletters, the reason you are sending them is first and foremost that you want to inform.
Whether your business is about providing service or selling products, your email newsletters are all about important updates, sales, new services or products, and every other thing you deem important or exciting for your consumer base to hear about.
Of course, all of the important information will be on your dedicated website. That said, you want your email newsletters to inform customers of these amazing opportunities and click on the link(s) you’ve provided in the email newsletters.
According to research outlined in a report by Campaign Monitor, the Click-Through Rate (CTR) is an additional prevalent metric that aids in assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns. The CTR gauges the number of individuals who clicked on the hyperlinks within your email. For instance, if your email contained a link to avail an offer, the CTR would indicate the proportion of subscribers who engaged with your links.
Clickthrough Rate or CTR is important to monitor every day as this provides immediate insight into how your emails are performing. You can make future plans based on what you see in your CTR.
With that being said, CTR can change over time and ideally, with proper strategizing, your CTR improves over time.
- Consumer engagement: Open Rate
On top of the Clickthrough Rate, another super essential metric to monitor daily is the open rate. Some email marketing experts may even put this as a top priority.
After all, your email Open Rate shows you whether or not your consumer base actually engages with your newsletter content. Managing a large consumer base for email marketing consumes a lot of money.
When you keep consumers that aren’t even engaging with your email newsletters, you are burning money instead of making it.
Taken from insights highlighted in the Benchmarker Email study, the Open Rate emerges as a pivotal metric in the realm of email marketing, demanding diligent observation. This metric concerns the correlation between the total number of emails dispatched and the number of emails recipients have accessed. Continuing to retain non-engaging consumers within your email newsletters translates to squandering funds rather than generating them.
With that being said, it is important to monitor who amongst your consumer base actually opens the emails you’ve sent.
Some people work really hard to create email subjects that are really funny in order to get people to open their emails. However, some experts believe that Open Rate can be quite misleading as the calculation is a bit dodgy.
Your email may be counted as ‘not opened’ just because image blocking has been put in place.
- Thinking of profit: Conversion Rate
For those of you whose main goal is lead or sales, Conversion Rate has got to be one of the most important metrics to look at. Conversion Rate shows you the percentage of how many emails you’ve sent that actually generate profit.
Your idea of ‘profit’, again, may simply be lead or other things besides sales. But for most people, a purchase or participation (for an event or webinar, for example) is what would be considered a desired goal.
If you’ve sent a lot of email newsletters, but the Conversion Rate is low, you ought to change your strategies. In order to improve Conversion Rate, people usually utilise call-to-action links.
It is even more beneficial if the call-to-action remarks put some time-sensitive pressure to make action immediately. Sales of items or services usually utilise this strategy to get consumers to make a purchase within a given time.
- Virality: Forwarding Rate
When it comes to generating profit, we want a high Conversion Rate. But focusing on only Conversion Rate doesn’t mean you are generating new leads or prospects.
When it comes to email newsletters, your Conversion Rate is mainly generated by people who are already part of your consumer base. How do you expand your database so you generate new prospects?
Get your existing consumers to share your email newsletters. Exciting updates and new releases tend to attract new prospects. When you are announcing such information, make sure your email recipients get to share the news easily.
With that being said, it is important to have social media sharing tools in your email newsletters. That way, anybody who reads your emails has a chance to share your updates on their own social media.
People also like to share links via chat messengers, so don’t forget to include a button for that.
- Consumer base expansion: List Growth Rate
After paying attention to and studying enough of all of the metrics mentioned above, you also want to lastly pay attention to your List Growth Rate. This is all about the growth rate of your database.
As per findings presented by AdRoll, the rate of growth of your email list is indicated by your list growth rate. To compute this metric, follow these steps: Subtract the count of new subscribers from the count of unsubscribed individuals, then divide the result by the total number of email addresses on your list. Lastly, multiply the obtained figure by 100, yielding your list growth rate.
Your consumer or subscriber database, to be precise. After all of the efforts you have put into growing your database, what does the growth percentage look like? Does the number satisfy you?
Is that good enough for your conversion and sales? Do you have a set number in mind that you wish to achieve? Looking at your List Growth Rate can help you gain insight into how well your email marketing is doing.
And if you wish to improve that rate, you may want to send more emails that include a call-to-action to join your mailing list or subscribe to your weekly content.
With that being said, the Forwarding Rate of your email newsletters can also help.
